Scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and their colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past, thus circumventing the second law of thermodynamics. Scientific Reports has published an article about the experiment.
The second law of thermodynamics states that the time in the Universe always runs forwards and cannot be reversed. However, scientists took a different approach to the issue.
“We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time,” said MIPT expert Gordei Lesovik.
Several years ago, Russian scientists discovered that the second law of thermodynamics can be circumvented at the quantum level. They held an experiment to see whether the time can be reversed for one particle that exists within the laws of quantum physics.
It turned out that an electron can go back in time, that is, return to its earlier state. However, the reverse evolution of the particle’s state would only happen once in the entire lifetime of the universe, and only by 0.06 nanoseconds.
The experiment used an IBM cloud quantum computer. Gordei Lesovik and his colleagues will continue the development of time-reversing algorithms.